America's
green jobs movement parades as many green hues as our national parks,
ranging from deep green work to pale green employment.

All green work expands the economy by reducing waste of
resources, workers and wealth. Green jobs make life easier for everyone
by reducing the costs of fuel, food, and housing. Green work repairs
soil, water and air, making these cleaner and healthier.

Liz Robinson, whose Energy Coordinating Agency trains
people to insulate and weatherize, says,
"You're going to be shocked how big these efforts are. The tipping
point in Philadelphia is very exciting to see. Efficiencies are the
cleanest, safest, most labor-intensive, and cheapest sources of energy."
Yet the deepest green jobs do even more than sharply cut fossil fuel
dependence, and provide more than a paycheck. They serve the broader
social mission to shift economic power toward lower-income
neighborhoods. They replace the Poverty Industry (charity, police,
courts, jails) with worker-owned neighborhood light
industries. They enable low-skilled neighbors to employ one another to
create work that lowers their living expenses.

Exemplary of such grassroots enterprise are Chicago's Center for
Neighborhood Technology, and the Evergreen
Cooperatives of Cleveland, sponsored by the Cleveland
Foundation and the City of Cleveland. They grow fresh hydroponic
vegetables, perform brownfield remediation, photovoltaic installation,
weatherization, and operate a water-conserving nontoxic laundry.

In Philadelphia, Project RISE facilitates green
business starts among ex-offenders and at-risk youth. Says director
Bernadine Hawes, "The vision should be based on what the population
being served sees, and not just on the standards and traditions of the
professional business development community."

John Churchville, green jobs planner for the American
Cities Foundation, agrees. "The mind switch from seeking a job to
creating a green business has
the potential to single-handedly bring
our entire nation back from the brink of economic ruin. Building a
green economy that has the capacity to employ the majority of America's
unemployed and underemployed residents will be critical
for our future thriving as a city."

Yet Americans are
wealthy in this poverty, because deep green jobs
that fix the above rise from vacant lots and vacant lives, from
Americans hungry for dinner and hungry for respect. Our
empty lots invite planting, and our abandoned houses need
labor-intensive retrofit or deconstruction. There are tons of vagrant
bricks and tires, discarded pallets and newspapers that are feedstock
for simple energy-efficient neighborhood industry.

Addressing America's loss of millions factory jobs during the
previous 40 years, Leanne Krueger-Braneky, Director of the Sustainable
Business Network
says, "the time is right for a fresh, invigorating and equitable
conversation about local sustainable manufacturing..."

Philadelphia's Director
of Sustainability,
Katherine Gajewski, reports that "most clean economy jobs will require
literacy in math, science and computer literacy. The best way to make
sure that ex-offenders and unemployed residents can get access to those
jobs is for them to upgrade those foundational skills."

These important skills particularly serve the higher-tech corporate
green jobs that might some day hire a few hundred thousands jobless.
However, as Green For All
founder Van Jones says, "There should be a moral principle there that
says, let's green the ghetto first. Let's go to those communities where
they have the least ability to pay for that retrofit and make sure they
get that help, make sure they get that support. And give the young
people standing on those corners the opportunity to put down those
handguns and pick up some caulking guns and be a part of the solution."

By his standard, the most urgent task is not to employ a few hundred
people in solar/wind factories, paying them so well they can become
grander consumers, but to create useful work for all idle
Philadelphians, so they're warm and fed and respected without resorting
to crime.

How do we pay for
their green labor? Since investment in deep green
enterprise will be less immediately profitable, bolder financial
institutions are needed to expand neighborhood authority over money,
trade, investment, interest rates and land use. Paths are clearing
through which the rich profit by empowering, rather than dominating,
the poor.

Of course, there's
more to capital than dollars, euros, pesos or yen.
Green jobs can be capitalized by regional credit systems that redirect
dollar equivalents toward greening. Great Barrington's Berkshares
foster connections that spark new businesses. Ithaca
(NY) HOURS assert that labor is the new
gold standard
-- millions have been traded since 1991. HOUR microloans are made
interest-free. Who backs such money? We are the bank, we are the
treasury, and we are the treasure.

The deepest green jobs aim to entirely rebuild American cities toward
balance with nature. This is the explicit intent of "Deep Green Cities: Fulfilling the Green Jobs
Promise," a new book by the California Construction Academy. Ecocity
Builders
envisions "the global rebuilding of cities and towns based on
ecological principles." The group Carfree Cities declares "We
can
convert existing cities to the carfree model over a period of decades.
Venice, Italy, is an oasis of peace despite being one of the densest
urban areas on earth." Deepest imaginable green is "Los
Angeles: A History of the Future,"
which portrays America's car capitol thriving without cars or streets,
where millions reside in passive solar earth-sheltered "ecolonies" amid
massive orchards linked with bikepaths and rail.

Take your pick. On every scale, there's plenty of green work to be done.